‘The Music! The Madness! The Majesty! – QUEEN – How They Ruled the 70s’
Queen are once again on the front of Classic Rock Magazine (268, November Issue) and this time there is a focus on their first decade: “The perfect animals for the 70s.”
Titled ‘We Are The Champions’ and running through pages 28 to 39 the feature includes some great quotes from the band and Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter.
“Freddie couldn’t understand why Queen weren’t huge immediately. I remember him saying: “Why don’t these silly bastards get it?”
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS
EXTRACT:
Queen’s first decade was a glorious hot streak – interrupted by poverty, gangrene and being pelted with hot dogs. This is the true story of the band who were “the perfect animals for the 70s.
Some bands are born lucky. Even before they embarked on the dizzying ascent of the decade ahead, Queen’s birth in London, in the summer of 1970, was a flash of serendipity, a triumph of time and place. Warmed by The Who, Zeppelin, Purple and Pink Floyd at the fag end of the 60s, the rock scene was ready for bigger, louder, more grandiosely pomp pageantry. In this new era, all of those qualities would be championed, just as they would have been ridiculed, if Queen had been just a few years earlier or later out of the blocks. Of course the band’s good fortune would stutter – and ultimately run out in tragic fashion. But when Freddie Bulsara offered his services to the disintegrating London rock band Smile, he could not have been better placed.
It was February 1970. For a failing rock star, Bulsara, as Freddie Mercury was then known, had some strident opinion about the magic formula for success. As a hanger-on and associate of Smile since the late 60s – and singer with fellow long shots Ibex – the Zanzibar-born art student had watched Brian May and Roger Taylor labour to capitalise on their obvious talents and was always ready with a critique of their shoe-string, denim-clad modus operandi. “I remember Freddie very much dressed lie a rock star,” observed Brian May.
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